West Haven playground dedication set for Saturday

Published 3:52 pm, Friday, October 14, 2016

WEST HAVEN >> The city and its partners from area Lowe’s stores will hold a rededication and reopening of the Painter Park playground on Kelsey Avenue at 11:30 a.m. Saturday.

Mayor Ed O’Brien will dedicate the newly rebuilt wooden playground in honor of Kelsey Avenue resident and former city schoolteacher Maureen Blake, who led a grass-roots effort to bring a playground to the neighborhood more than 20 years ago.

O’Brien also will offer his appreciation to Lowe’s for its charitable contributions to the playground’s rehabilitation.

“The renovation of our flagship playground would not have been possible without the invaluable and unwavering support of Lowe’s,” O’Brien said in a release. “I want to thank the many volunteers for their labor of love in putting this playground back into optimal condition. I also want to thank Maureen Blake for her inspiring role in the construction of this playground 22 years ago.”

Employees from four Lowe’s stores in New Haven, Orange, Derby and Milford recently restored the playground as part of their annual “Lowe’s Heroes” community service project. The stores donated about $10,000 worth of materials and work was done by dozens of volunteers, according to Lowe’s of Milford Store Manager John Cipriano.

The work, completed in five weeks at no cost to city taxpayers, included replacing all swingset equipment and hardware, beams and boards and benches. It also included restabilizing the wooden retaining wall, adding picnic tables and fresh mulch and re-staining the playground.

The castle-theme playground was erected over five days in May 1994 by a group of about 100 volunteers with a shared vision for building for West Haven’s future, city recreation program coordinator Tom Conroy, who organized the renovation project, said in the release.

The ceremony also will mark the public reopening of the playground, which had fallen into disrepair and was ordered closed in April by the city’s insurance carrier due to safety concerns. Two months later, Park-Rec received an estimate of $150,000 to $180,000 to rehabilitate the popular playground.